Chapter 4. The Climate of Collectivism

While the debates over metaphysics and epistemology might seem “academic” and neither of concern nor of consequence to the day-to-day lives of most people, it cannot be stressed enough that the conclusions of philosophical ideas operate quite extensively in the lives of people; they just tend to be hidden and subtle. The basic story already revealed in the preceding chapters is that Kantian skepticism about reason led to the growth of subjectivism and relativism in the modern world. In this chapter we willexplore how these postmodern ideas drift into politics.

As was pointed out, subjectivity in values, meaning that there is no objective basis to value one thing over another, should open the doors for postmodernists to engage in, or permit, a variety of political programs, from the extreme left through to the extreme right. However, postmodernists in practice have tended to favor some political agendas over others. In fact, there are very few examples of postmodernists that stray from what seems like the monolithic position of far-Left politics.

All major postmodern thinkers, such as Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Rorty, are all on the far Left. This would also include the lesser known figures previously mentioned in Table 2. Academics, when surveyed, are known to have an overall left-wing slant when compared to the general population. However, while not all academics are progressives, it is difficult to find a postmodernist who does not advocate for left-wing politics. This suggests the idea that there is more invested in postmodern politics than the neutrality